Secrets of Successful Interviewing

By Hugh Murray & David Friedman

Hiring errors rank amongst the costliest of common business mistakes. A recent study showed the direct costs associated with a poor hiring decision of a mid-level manager approached $40,000. What strategy is in place at your organization to lower this risk and maximize your chances of hiring the right person the first time?

What is behavior-based interviewing?
Behavior-based interviewing is a technique where questions are asked about past behaviors. It is effective because past behavior is the best indicator of how a person will behave in the future.

Behavior-based interviewing is different from biographical interviewing. Biographical interviewing involves asking questions about the past and is what most interviewers usually do. You will need to ask questions like "I see you worked in the engineering department for three years. What exactly did you do there?" before you can ask behavioral questions.

A behavioral question goes deeper. It focuses on one specific incident, sometimes called a critical incident, and probes to find out how the individual behaved during that incident. An example of behavioral question is: "Can you tell me about a time during your work on the T54 when you realized that you were not going to complete a drawing on time? ("Yes."). What did you do?"

Behavior-based interviewing is also different from hypothetical interviewing. An example of a hypothetical question would be: "What would you do if…?" This can be useful for understanding someone’s thought process but not a reliable indicator of what someone will actually do.

Behavior-based interviewing is also called competency-based interviewing or critical-incident interviewing.

What is behavior and why does it matter?
When psychologists talk about behavior, they refer to all the responses that a person has to a stimulus, which includes everything that goes on in and from a person in a particular situation. Examples include what they think, what they feel, and what they do.

At work, we are interested in the way people do their jobs. This is observable behavior. All sorts of things might be going on beneath the surface but the part we can see is the way they do their jobs.

When we recruit somebody, we want to know how he will approach his job and the best indicator of this is his past behavior and that’s why the behavior-based interviewer is interested in it.

Behavior is remarkably consistent. If a person is scared of heights atop the Sears Tower, he is likely to be scared on the 82nd floor of the Empire State building. We do not have to understand everything that is going on inside to make predictions about how someone will behave in a given situation.

We all have natural characteristics, which tend to assert themselves again and again. We can adjust these and in some cases, such as overcoming a fear. We can change our behavior, but past behavior remains the best, though not a perfect indicator of how we will behave in future.

The advantages of behavior-based interviewing
The advantages of behavior-based interviewing can be summed up as:

· Effective: Behavior-based questions find out how people have actually behaved in the past. This gives you a much better indication of how they will behave in the future.

· Objective: By comparing the way someone has actually behaved in work situations, the interviewer is unaffected by subjective feelings that the interview may have.

· Transparent: The candidate can’t tell the interviewers "what they want to hear" because he or she will be describing actual events. The candidate would have to quickly construct a complicated lie to do this, and that story would certainly not hold up as questions proceeded.

· Legal: The competencies sought are openly described and all candidates are given an equal chance to demonstrate that they have those competencies. Provided every candidate is asked for evidence of the same competencies, and provided those competencies are genuinely necessary to the performance of the job, organizations will avoid discrimination by asking behavior-based questions.

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David Friedman is Vice President of Telephone Doctor Customer Service Training, a twenty year old provider of products and services which improve the way organizations communicate with their customers. Visit our website at www.telephonedoctor.com for more information.

Published in Networking Today, November, 2006